The Seasons

Four Journeys into Raili and Reima Pietilä's Architecture

The Helsinki-based architect Raili Pietilä states that he does not want to deal with truth, in case the truth turns out to be `a black hole where gravity is too great for anything to exist.' Rather, he seeks to steer around reality through metaphor, and to make buildings which are frameworks in which reality can exist. His highly individual approach to creating a building might involve exploring grammar, the structure of sentences, the narrative method of novels, or the identities of the seasons. He will listen to music in search of a formal `theme.' He will study landscape, or the effect of wind and snow on water. All these will inform his design, so that the overall experience of a Pietilä environment will be rooted in a source which those who look at or live in it may never guess at. In this film he takes us around a range of his buildings. We see a residential complex set in a birch forest, in which the patterns of tree bark, trunks and foliage provide the motif for the façades. When building a modern city church, the architect's aim is to marry a sense of sanctuary and transcendence with a continued contact with the everyday world, seen through apertures and doorways, in contrast to the enclosed feeling of Gothic cathedrals. Finally, the architect revisits his Finnish Embassy building in India, built with traditional local labor methods, but designed to follow the patterns of Finland's snow-swept landscape. Here he speaks of the detachment any artist can feel for a long-finished work, enclosing a reality as mysterious to its creator as to anyone else who encounters it.

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.